The DRP has a program known as VIP or the Verified Industrial Properties Program. The goal of the program is to proactively identify, assess and ready vacant industrial land sites across the region, increasing our ability to secure new corporate expansion projects and jobs for the region. Nationally, the industrial sector is very robust with unprecedented investments occurring in the mobility, semiconductor, automation, logistics and green energy fields. These opportunities have constrained timeframes and require ready to go land sites to meet their condensed project construction schedules. The Detroit Region is lacking such sites and the VIP by DRP program was developed to address this concern. Additionally, many of these sites are brownfield sites that possess ideal proximity to workforce and infrastructure. These brownfield sites are often located in historically excluded communities (HECs) and historically the neighboring communities may not have had a voice in the industrial uses that were placed in their neighborhoods. The VIP program is interested in identifying proven best practices for how future industrial development can engage community input, attract investment that best aligns with community workforce needs and broader priorities, offer solutions, including design guidelines, to help mitigate any negative development impacts, and provide proactive recommendations for how industrial landowners and developers can create win-win scenarios for both their end users and adjacent residents.

The DRP wants to work with the NYU students to develop the most appropriate scope of work and methodology, but broadly we would like the team to research examples of best in class programs and solutions being deployed by economic development agencies, communities, developers and industrial end users around the world that are helping foster more collaborative industrial development that takes the context of neighboring residents into the sites development and ongoing operation. This might include best practices tied to  proactively engaging input and needs of area neighbors in advance of the sites development; improving benefits to neighboring residents, including access to jobs aligned to their skills and interests; development design that minimizes physical impacts to the surrounding neighbors; ongoing community engagement strategies that keep the lines of communication open between the development and the community; etc. The output of this research should lead to a menu of actionable steps, tools and programs that could be deployed by VIP and its partner communities, developers, end users to increase positive and more equitable industrial development. 

A well researched list of best practices that can be analyzed and evaluated by the DRP and VIP program stakeholders for inclusion as a service of the program. We would like to bring forward new, thoughtful and implementable tools that will lead to better and more beneficial industrial development in and adjacent to HECs. The mission of the DRP is to attract the next generation of high quality companies and jobs to our region, providing residents the skills, pay and benefits to sustain the their families and actively engage in their communities.